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A Real Find

New York City offers some top-notch trash. Practically anybody who has lived there has noticed, or even taken home, a perfectly good end table or a bookshelf that has been left on the sidewalk next to bags of garbage by someone who didn’t want it anymore. Even city dwellers who don’t partake know about this informal circulation of goods as a feature of urban object culture played out in the public sphere. And in the 21st century, almost anything that occurs in the public sphere can also serve as an inspiration, or even a medium, for the formal circulation of goods: that is, for a marketing stunt.

And so in early November, a marketing agency’s “street team” began scattering a client’s products on the sidewalks of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The client was Blu Dot, a Minneapolis design studio and maker of furniture that has enjoyed the praise of the design press for some years now. The product: Blu Dot’s Real Good chair, a slim metal seat that comes in several colors and normally costs $129. Twenty-five were placed on sidewalks. They stood out visually, and about half of them came with something extra: a hidden global-positioning-system device. This allowed the object’s movement to be tracked and its new owner located and, ideally, interviewed for a video that will be shown in Blu Dot’s SoHo store on Dec. 14, marking its one-year anniversary in New York.

John Christakos, one of Blu Dot’s founders, liked the sound of all this when Mono, a marketing agency, suggested the scheme. “We thought it was cool,” he says. “To me, it felt almost like a performance piece.” That said, he concedes to being a little concerned about how the “piece” might conclude: that some chair takers, when eventually contacted, would react with “cynicism,” seeing the whole exercise as “just a marketing ploy.” That’s a fair concern; everybody’s sick of the branding hype and endless sales pitches that seem to pervade daily life. But in fact, at least some of the chairs went to people who reacted in precisely the opposite way. As soon as they heard about the publicity stunt, they wanted to participate.

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Mono shared with me some notes taken by the employees who placed the chairs (and often hung around to watch what happened), as well as footage of a few interviews for its video about the project. Chairs left in TriBeCa went quickly. Chinatown’s Confucius Plaza turned out to be one of the “toughest” environments, possibly because in that setting the chairs looked less like discarded furniture and more like an official part of a public environment. In contrast, the “fastest grab” involved a chair left in the gentrifying Bushwick section of Brooklyn and picked up about 10 seconds later. “An early-30s man, later discovered to be an industrial designer, walked past the chair and took it at once, without a pause in his gait or his phone conversation.”

Web features promoted the chair giveaway in real time: a Flickr account, a chair-tracking Google map on the Blu Dot Web site and a Twitter feed that announced chair locations. Thus a small pack of people ended up making a lot of effort to get a free chair. The chair in Confucius Plaza was eventually taken by a woman who arrived in a cab with that express purpose in mind. But there was some concern that the chairs would all be taken by design freaks with notable eyewear and huge lofts, as opposed to a cross-section of New Yorkers. So the Blu Dot team stopped Tweeting chair drops in advance.

There were a few snags, like the woman who picked up a chair left in the West Village. “She noticed the G.P.S., ripped it out and continued on her way,” Team Blu Dot reported. And an attempt to plant one where a particular “eccentric artist” would encounter it was foiled when this individual walked past the chair without stopping — and a “cute, hip couple” took it instead. But Michael Hart, a founder and the creative director of Mono, sounds pleased with the results: a few hundred Twitter followers, a bunch of blog posts (including an epic recounting of the efforts of one of the chair-chasing scavengers) and, obviously, this column.

As for the potential negative reaction to this marketing as street theater, there doesn’t seem to have been much. Maybe there’s a parallel to the way most Americans are said to loathe Congress in general but keep re-electing their own representatives: Marketing is an awful intrusion, unless we’re totally into the chair (or whatever) being marketed. In any case, almost every locatable chair-taker was willing to be interviewed on camera — including that cute, hip couple. Turns out she’s a Fashion Institute of Technology student and he’s a furniture maker (with notable eyewear). In the footage I saw, he was the only person to muse about a great street find turning out to be real-life product placement. “I suppose in this day and age,” he observes, “it’s only a matter of time till something like this happens to each one of us.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2009, on Page MM26 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: A Real Find. Today's Paper|Subscribe